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Notes -
You might recall that an adjunct professor was let go from Hamline University after a Muslim student complained about a depiction of the prophet Muhammad shown in class. The immediate responses were not terribly surprising to me. Given past incidents, I assumed that college administrators would have an interest towards affirming the student's complaint, no matter how unreasonable it was. This panned out, with the university president issuing a very bizarre statement where she presented non-sequiturs like:
What do the demographics of the university president have to do with academic freedom? Fuck if I know.
Similarly, I also assumed that non-profit organizations would have an interest to bolster their profile by seizing upon the incident. This too panned out, with the local Minnesota Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) chapter condemning the professor as Islamophobic. The local chapter's executive director even dismissed the fact that the professor went out of her way to add a content warning and said "In reality a trigger warning is an indication that you are going to do harm."
Since then, things have changed. First, the national CAIR organization felt the need to step in and rebuke the local chapter, and issued a (tepid) defense of the scorned professor. Then, Hamline University faculty just voted overwhelmingly (71-12) to ask the president to step down. For a defense of freedom of expression, the statement they issued is (at least on its face) pretty good.
Both of these developments surprised me, and it made me wonder whether this is a sign of a potential turning point on the topic of suppressed freedom of expression on campus.
This story is noteworthy because it happened to a professor; hardly anyone cares or talks about people who get fired from other professions for stupid, arbitrary reasons. Just as profs are at the mercy of students, other employees are at mercy of customers complaining, bosses, etc. It's like work is not fun and workers are in a precarious position and must be on their toes. Also, one must keep in perspective how uncommon this is. There are over 200k people employed in higher ed in the US in depending if you count full vs. part time, adjust vs. tenured, etc. --it's a lot.
But on the other hand, the notion of academic freedom is considered to be inviolable, which I guess is why these stories get so much attention despite being so rare. It also has a chilling effect, so it's not entirely isolated even though it's uncommon. I think only tenured profs are protected.
I'm not speaking on this particular incident because I don't know enough details, but a lot of these people who get shoved out ceremoniously are in a precarious position for a reason totally unrelated to the incident--workplace feuds, poor performance, being a weirdo in a general undefined sense, etc. Then management or HR will take some arbitrary unsubstantiated claim and kick them out. This is pretty common in the mid and higher ranges of bureaucracies and probably makes up a lot of woke firings IMO.
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